Featured Stories in Northern Ireland (2025)

LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland — In May 2024, Billy Scampton from Londonderry and Shannon Ritchie-Leet from Ontario, Canada, walked to the edge of River Strule in Omagh, Northern Ireland. Together, they scattered the ashes of their mother into the water and watched as the river carried them away. The two siblings may have been sharing an…

LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland — Jesus, understandably, is the star of most Passion Plays. The story of Christ’s Passion, derived from the Latin word “passio,” meaning “suffer” — recounts the final days leading to Jesus’s crucifixion and death, based on accounts in the four Gospels of the Christian Bible. In the Northern Ireland town of Londonderry,…

BELFAST, Northern Ireland – The St. Patrick’s Day Parade here this year featured the expected shamrocks, green hats, traditional Irish dancers and a man dressed as a leprechaun. However, participants also included members of communities not commonly associated with the ultra-Christian, Anglo-Saxon stereotype of Northern Ireland. One of these groups floated down the street in…

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — One Friday morning two years ago, Harvey Mills took a train to Belfast from his quiet hometown of Ballymena. While he told his parents he was off to meet some friends, in reality, he was on his way to speak with a shaykh at the Belfast Islamic Centre. This was the…

LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland — On a late Sunday afternoon in January 1972, 27-year-old William McKinney slung a new movie camera over his shoulder and draped a rain jacket over his arm as he walked out of his home. He was on the way to document a Catholic civil rights march just a few streets down…

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — When Brexit first went into effect in 2020, Makkah Market’s Ramadan order came late. The owner, Mohammed Abdelnoor, has since learned that he needs to order products for Ramadan at least three weeks in advance to make sure they arrive on time. Much of his inventory, which previously came through Dublin,…

RATHFRILAND, Northern Ireland —  It all started in 2017 with a trench. That year, a power company was preparing to build a 135-foot-tall wind turbine near the summit of Knock Iveagh, a pre-Christian ceremonial hill outside the market town of Rathfriland. Anne Harper, a musician and local whose spirituality is best described as “Celtic,” stared…

BELFAST – The Northern Ireland Interfaith Forum typically meets over lunch, but at a recent gathering, the secretary, Edwin Graham, wouldn’t even have a cup of coffee. It was during Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month, he noted, and a fasting day for the Baha’i. “Apologies to our Muslim friends who are fasting at the moment,…

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — On Saturdays, the Jewish day of rest and prayer, there is barely a quorum of 10 at the old synagogue in Northern Ireland’s capital city. But every other Wednesday, the place is hopping. A gaggle of seniors gathers for lectures, conversation, lunch and socializing. Only some of them are Jewish.  “I…

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — On the eve of Saint Patrick’s Day this year, locals gathered to ring in the holiday at a local club with a musical display of Irish indigeneity. Amid shouts and cheers, Stephen Loughran, an Irish trad musician donning a druid-inspired ram skull, declared collective ancestry from the mythological warrior-hunter Fianna in…

TEMPLEPATRICK, Northern Ireland — Growing up, I had always heard tales that our family’s ancestry was Scots-Irish, via the Greer surname that I now carry as a middle name. But that alone isn’t enough to know where I come from — the Scots-Irish have a broad and complicated history. They’re tied to multiple U.S. presidents as well…